I was asked to make sure you read it, the principal said.
I certainly will, Hannah said, as soon as I finish these sock puppets of global revolution.
The principal left. It was unwise to bait him—in the long run it could only hurt her—but still sometimes she could not help herself.
She already knew what the letter was. The New York City Board of Education was in the process of purging all teachers with any Communist past or inclination, and as it happened Hannah had joined the Communist Party for a little over a year when she first moved to Harlem in 1947. She was twenty-two at the time, recently married, and she and Billy were about to walk away from all their family and friends. Her consciousness was late in forming, perhaps, but Hannah had no doubts about her path. She had been complicit for far too long. When she announced where they were going, and why, there were scenes with her mother, with her father, with Lila. They would move only twenty blocks north.
Hannah was training to be a teacher; it was her Party contacts who had suggested the move to Harlem. The Party was a force in the union there. The Communists interpreted Marxism as a mandate for the most basic forms of racial equality, a view not shared by the NYC Board of Education, and they had been active in Harlem since the Depression. In Hannah’s school, Communism meant access to the same textbooks and pencils as the children thirty blocks downtown, clean water in the water fountains, healthy and edible food for lunch. Everything was concrete here, and nothing abstract. It was as if she had emerged from shadow into light.
Billy did not think in these terms. He saw the world as a series of possibilities, of rich ambiguities, and not, as she did, as a struggle between good and evil. Justice was not an emotion for Billy, as it was for her. He understood her sense of mission, certainly. He appreciated her energy and the depth of her commitment. He asked how he could help, although he never went to a meeting and he was not interested in the Party per se. And yet, without her calling, without the nourishment of a small group of similar souls, and as a person entirely able to sleep at night in the face of de facto segregation and other outrages, Billy had still agreed to throw away his old world, to let his friendships go (an estranged brother was his only close family) and to start over with her in a place that meant nothing to him, and so much to her. He kept his job and really nothing else. It was, Hannah thought, the most romantic thing she could possibly imagine.
It did not go well. Her new colleagues, her students, once even an old lady she met on the street—everyone was absolutely brutal; they called her a voyeur, a carpetbagger, a slumming rich girl, even a spy. She would smile back, which was an advantage—it surprised them—although she could do it only because they were right, and because she needed a job. Anyway, she asked them, wasn’t a voyeur still better than a debutante? The local criminals took Billy’s wallet nearly every week without even bothering to threaten him. It was often hard to see the larger truth: that they had this one life, and that it must mean something. Billy did not read the pamphlets or books; he did not believe in the slogans, but he did listen. He asked her pointed questions, and he accepted the answers. It was almost as if he trusted her to be the conscience for both of them. She was not worthy of that, but she tried—they both did—and very slowly their day-to-day improved. Billy helped a neighbor with an IRS problem, and word got around that the white guy who wore a tie every day knew about money. Almost overnight, he became the unofficial financial adviser for the neighborhood, including the criminals, whose tax dodges, Billy said, were far more ingenious than those he had seen farther downtown. He kept his wallet after that.
The letter from the Board of Education would say that she should report to a building in Midtown on a certain date and time, and that she should bring with her documentation of any formal, professional, political, or any other affiliations with which she would like to acquaint the Board. At this meeting, she would be asked by a man named Martin Berg, a New York City prosecutor, if she was now or had at any time been a member of the Communist Party. Regardless of her answer, she would then be asked to name others known to her as Communists. Once the questions started, the forms of jeopardy were specific. Hannah could be fired for sedition—for having been a member of the Communist Party. She could be fired for perjury—if she said that she was not a member of the Communist Party when some unknown informant had named her. Or she could be fired for simple obfuscation—for refusing to name others. This was how Mr. Berg had already prosecuted many of her friends and colleagues, and Hannah was sure it was what he would do to her. His approach was perfectly legal—it had originated in the New York State Assembly with an abomination called the Feinberg Law that, on the face of it, banned treason from the civil service but had since been adapted as a weapon to beat Communism out of the schools. The law had been affirmed by the Supreme Court, so there was no longer any hope of rescue by a higher authority.
At those tribunals, the reckless or very ideological had in the past refused to answer any questions at all; those unfortunates had been suspended, pending further investigation. The investigation, then, would become a form of unpaid purgatory. A handful of those summoned had leapt into the waiting arms of their questioners and supplied the names of others. Some teachers had simply resigned in advance of an expected summons. Hannah and her friends saw these last as the very worst, even worse than the traitors, since their removal from the equation allowed the enemy to focus resources on fewer targets.
To say that Hannah had been insignificant to the Party would be an understatement; she was young and terrified, intimidated by the longstanding members, and she had barely spoken at the handful of meetings she had attended. When she had spoken, she was attacked. In the end, she realized, her critics were right: she saw the revolution as a metaphor or aspiration, or, at her most radical, as a simple improvement in one’s day-to-day circumstances. She did not see the relevance of Moscow to Harlem. She had finally resigned, or rather just stopped coming, as the meetings became more and more focused on the ideas of Trotsky rather than the fundamentally non-world-historical needs of her students, such as new chalkboards. Then, as these Board of Ed tribunals began to attack teachers she knew, the open question was whether she, Hannah, had been completely invisible to the authorities, or only partly so. Now they knew the answer.
17